Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

Briefly she relaxed, and let her head drop to his shoulder. ‘I’m lucky to have you. Lucky — funny word. It took the loss of your wife and baby to bring us together. What kind of luck is that?’

‘Lucky for me, in the end,’ he murmured. Lucky that he had found something drily comforting in the strength of this woman, a distant cousin older than him, widowed a decade ago, her only son long grown and left. Even though they both felt it was best to keep the relationship as private as possible. He kissed the top of her head, the greying unbrushed hair. ‘We’ll still be here in the spring-’

The house groaned again, and there was a snap, of wood splitting. They both sat up. From beyond the walls came a crackling crunch, like a tree trunk breaking, then a softer collapse. Cries of anger and pain.

They looked at each other. ‘We need to get out of here,’ Crimm said.

It took only moments to pull on their cloaks, hoods, boots, mittens. Crimm kicked dirt over the hearth, damping down the fire. Ywa glanced once at her papers, but she didn’t need Crimm to tell her there was no time to pack them up.

They pushed their way through the door flap and out into the open. The snow was nearly up to their knees, Crimm saw with shock. How could so much have fallen so quickly? And so early ? And still it came down. When they stepped out of the lee of the house the snow, blasting on a wind straight from the north, came at them horizontally, thick and hard, heavy flakes stinging as they slapped Crimm’s face. He staggered, and reached for Ywa’s mittened hand.

A few steps away from the house they looked around. Ywa pointed. ‘There. It was Canda’s house.’

The house, or the wreck of it, was barely visible. Crimm saw supporting beams, some broken, sticking out of the heaped snow like snapped bones. But already fresh snow was covering over the wreckage.

‘We should help them.’

‘No.’ He pointed to figures plodding through the rush of snowflakes. ‘They’re already heading for the Wall. They must be all right.’

She hesitated, then nodded, and they set off.

There was a shortcut to the Wall, a diagonal path, but they were walking through a uniform whiteness. Wary of getting lost Crimm led Ywa to the Etxelur Way, the main road that ran south to north directly to the heart of the Wall. The Way was cambered and lined with poles where banners flew on festival days; following the poles they couldn’t get lost. He put his arm around Ywa’s waist, and they pulled their furs up over their mouths, and pushed their way through snow and wind.

When Kia wanted to be nice to Thux, she would tell him she had two sons, him and Engine Seventy-Four. But on a day like today, with her engine struggling, there was no hiding the fact that there was only one true priority in her life. Still, in a corner of her heart she thanked the little mothers for giving her a son like Thux: smart, strong, flexible, and even handy with a wrench. He was young yet, but already one of the true mechanikoi , like herself; it must be in the blood.

Now the two of them stood in the engine room, watching the labouring of their steel beast with some anxiety.

This chamber, with its rough plastered-over growstone walls, was entirely embedded within the body of the Wall, not far below its parapet. Shelves were cluttered with the paraphernalia of their profession: precision screws, gears, transmission chains, camshafts, pistons, valves. The engine itself was a massive cylinder that filled the room. Its big rocking arm converted the heat of good Albian coal to motive force, the force that helped keep the ground by the face of the Wall pumped dry, and worked elevators within the Wall, and lifted cargo cranes on the sea-facing side. The whole apparatus was surrounded by condenser pipes and feeds that kept the engine working to its best theoretical ability, and bled steam and hot water off into the body of the Wall to keep its inhabitants in the warmth and comfort to which they had been accustomed for centuries, even in the hardest winter. Engine Seventy-Four was dumb, but it was big and strong and reliable — just as Kia liked to say of her son, not inaccurately. But today it was in trouble. You didn’t need to read the liquid-level gauges showing pressure and temperature and steam output and all the rest to know that; you could feel it, standing in this growstone pen before the labouring beast.

As Kia and Thux stood there bewildered, a few flakes of snow came drifting down the ventilation shafts from the outside world, quickly melting in the heat of the engine room.

‘It’s overheating,’ Kia said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Thux replied. ‘I know it’s snowing-’

‘I’ve never known it to snow so hard before, I have to say. Certainly not this early in the winter.’

‘But the loops should be too hot to be affected by the frost.’ Big radiator loops were embedded in the Wall’s outer surface, to enable the engines, buried in the body of the Wall, to lose heat. ‘In fact,’ Thux said, ‘the colder it is outside the better the heat loss. Right? What then, Mother? Owl’ A mass of snow came tumbling down a shaft, straight onto his head and shoulders. Splashing onto the floor it quickly melted, leaving a shallow puddle. As Kia tried not to laugh, Thux brushed the residue off his hair and shoulders. ‘How could that happen? It’s impossible.’

Kia peered up the shaft. ‘Not if the snow’s falling fast enough. Maybe ice is forming on the protective grilles. .’ She snapped her fingers. ‘That’s it. The exhaust shafts must be blocked by ice and snow. Our baby’s choking. One of us will have to go up and clear it. I’ll go,’ she said immediately.

‘No,’ he snapped.

‘You’ve never seen conditions like this before.’

‘Well, nor have you. My job, Mother. I’m younger than you. And it wouldn’t cost as much to replace me.’ He went to a locker and began to pull out his kit.

‘All right. With weight like mine I’d probably break the ladders anyhow. But make sure you suit up properly. Scarf, peaked hat, mask, heavy gloves.’

‘I know.’ Struggling, he pulled a tight coverall lined with gull feathers over his regular work clothes.

Kia went back to her gauges. She wasn’t about to say it, in fact she didn’t really trust herself to say anything, but today, at forty-three years old, she felt unreasonably proud of her only son. And of herself, she admitted, not to mention Engine Seventy-Four. People had always looked down on the House of the Beavers, Northland’s engineers, even though it was as old as any of the nation’s ancient guilds — and their nickname of the mechanikoi showed they had absorbed as much of the tradition of the learned Greeks who had once flocked to Northland as any of the more academic Houses. After all, without the Beavers’ work on the Wall and the various other sea-defence measures in the very beginning, Northland would not even exist, it would all have been lost under the sea before Ana was cold in her stony tomb in the Wall, probably. And these days the Beavers, equipped with new skills, worked harder than ever. The sages, nodding in deference to their inspirational founder Pythagoras, might lecture the world about the principles of heat flow and mechanical advantage, but it took a Beaver, one of the humble mechanikoi , crawling about in the dark and smoke and steam and sweat, to make it all work.

Except today it was only just working. All the Wall’s engines were labouring to cope with the flooding at the Wall’s base, caused by a brief warm spell. But that wasn’t the only stress on her engine. On such a day as this people must be flocking into the Wall for shelter, those who lived in smaller properties out on the plain — even those with homes in the chambered cloisters of Old Etxelur, which wasn’t as well equipped as the Wall. As they arrived, settling in the apartments and inns and taverns, they were all turning up the heat, and running deep steaming baths to soak away the cold of the day. She could see it all reflected in the bubbling levels of the gauges, hear it in the deep mechanical groans of the engine.